Apple CEO John Ternus pressured Apple senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi to “accelerate the company’s road map and move quickly beyond merely making necessary improvements to Siri,” reports Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter.
Citing anonymous sources, Gurman writes that Ternus is “frustrated by what he sees as a reluctance to embrace AI with the same urgency as competitors,” and pushed Federighi for changes in a meeting behind closed doors. Federighi, Gurman points out, has been considered an AI skeptic with concerns “about the technology’s privacy, security, societal and employment implications.”
Geezus how much more AI do we need? For the cost of it, we’re not getting the great benefits we thought we were going to get. It’s too environmentally harmful when it’s run in concentrated places. There’s also no reason to have these data centers. If PCs were invented today, we’d be renting PCs forever because this era isn’t about innovation anymore. It’s about trapping people in a rental world.
I can’s see the appeal for me but I think I can understand where Apple is coming from, at least in theory. More AI in phones means an excuse to sell you more powerful phones.
Unless you are very into having the latest piece of tech or your old phone dies, I haven’t seen much that a new phone can do and my 4 years old one can’t, so many people (including me) are sticking with their old phones for longer. AI seems like it has the potential to put something new on those marketing assets. Granted, it worked like shit with AI laptops/Copilot PCs but Apple has a knack for turning others’ failures into long lines of people fighting to give them their money so we’ll see…
A large part of this is also app development. App developers want as many peo0le as possible to use their apps, so they’re designed to work on phones that cost a hundred bucks new when they were sold on 2018.
PCs run into this with lots of things too, but one huge difference is the multitasking experience. I have a big-ass folding phone, but the multitasking experience still sucks, most because the phone is just a bad format for the kind of workflows that necessitate multitasking.
If I’m working in multiple windows, I need a keyboard and mouse. Yeah, I can have firefox open on one half of the screen and Outlook in the other on my phone, but it’s still the mobile version of both apps, and any time I want to type something half the screen becomes a keyboard.
So I don’t really have a need for a powerful phone. It’s a content consumption and communication device, both of which don’t need much horsepower.
If you want to live in the AI utopia of the 21st century, china sadly is the destination. Here in the us all we’ve got is israel’s surveillance feudal colony.